Complex, Contradictory Robert Moses (Exhibit/NYC)
Few shows force you to rethink an urban legend. That’s the challenge posed by “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” a sweeping, scholarly exhibition that breathes fresh air into one of the most tired, overworked and misunderstood subjects in the city’s history.
Shown at three New York locations, the exhibition traces Moses’ remarkable career as parks commissioner from 1934 to 1960 and as a leader of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority from 1934 to 1968, when he oversaw a radical transformation of New York through the construction of bridges, expressways and public parks and vast slum clearance projects. It paints a nuanced portrait of a man who, in the public imagination at least, has become a caricature of the ruthless bureaucrat.
Most effectively, the show maps the extent to which Moses’ decisions were governed by the larger forces shaping the 20th-century city: a booming car culture, panic over middle-class flight to the suburbs, the rigid orthodoxies of late Modernism. In the process it demolishes the polarizing arguments that still define New York architecture and planning debates a quarter-century after the master builder’s death. Organized by Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia University, the show should be required viewing for all government bureaucrats involved in urban policy — no, for anyone who loves New York.
For a generation of New Yorkers, Moses’ reputation was defined by his bitter battles in the 1960s, like the one with Jane Jacobs over a freeway proposal that would have condemned large sections of Lower Manhattan to the wrecking ball. It was cemented by Robert A. Caro’s “Power Broker,” the 1974 biography that famously portrayed Moses as a villainous figure who, through his control of federal slum clearance and highway money, was able to trample tens of thousands of lives, uprooting entire neighborhoods in a quest to impose his megalomaniacal vision: a city of dehumanizing superblocks strangled in ribbons of expressways.
The show’s intelligence is that it doesn’t shy away from Moses’ dark side. It includes one of his most shameful projects, the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which displaced thousands of souls and pitilessly erased the thriving middle-class neighborhood of East Tremont.
Read entire article at NYT
Shown at three New York locations, the exhibition traces Moses’ remarkable career as parks commissioner from 1934 to 1960 and as a leader of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority from 1934 to 1968, when he oversaw a radical transformation of New York through the construction of bridges, expressways and public parks and vast slum clearance projects. It paints a nuanced portrait of a man who, in the public imagination at least, has become a caricature of the ruthless bureaucrat.
Most effectively, the show maps the extent to which Moses’ decisions were governed by the larger forces shaping the 20th-century city: a booming car culture, panic over middle-class flight to the suburbs, the rigid orthodoxies of late Modernism. In the process it demolishes the polarizing arguments that still define New York architecture and planning debates a quarter-century after the master builder’s death. Organized by Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia University, the show should be required viewing for all government bureaucrats involved in urban policy — no, for anyone who loves New York.
For a generation of New Yorkers, Moses’ reputation was defined by his bitter battles in the 1960s, like the one with Jane Jacobs over a freeway proposal that would have condemned large sections of Lower Manhattan to the wrecking ball. It was cemented by Robert A. Caro’s “Power Broker,” the 1974 biography that famously portrayed Moses as a villainous figure who, through his control of federal slum clearance and highway money, was able to trample tens of thousands of lives, uprooting entire neighborhoods in a quest to impose his megalomaniacal vision: a city of dehumanizing superblocks strangled in ribbons of expressways.
The show’s intelligence is that it doesn’t shy away from Moses’ dark side. It includes one of his most shameful projects, the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which displaced thousands of souls and pitilessly erased the thriving middle-class neighborhood of East Tremont.